Sunshine Was Never Enough: Los Angeles Workers, 1880–2010 by John H. M. Laslett (review)

In Sunshine Was Never Enough: Los Angeles Workers, 1880–2010, John H. M. Laslett offers a whirlwind tour of the history of labor and labor relations in southern California. Although there is a growing body of literature on this topic, most studies focus only on one industry or population: women employees, citrus workers, and so on. A professor emeritus in history at the University of California, Los Angeles, Laslett has instead produced a much-needed overview of the complex and turbulent interplay of labor, politics, race, and gender designed for “the general reader, for students, and for those with a special interest in the region’s workers” (2). Laslett wisely casts a large geographic net to tell this story. The book encompasses not only Los Angeles itself but also a sixty-mile circle around the city. He thus covers coastal cities like San Pedro, citrus towns like Pomona, and everywhere in between. This approach also helps tie the region’s labor issues more directly to Mexico. Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants play a large role in Laslett’s narrative, particularly in the post–World War II chapters.

One of the key issues Laslett addresses is where Los Angeles’s labor history fits into the larger story of the United States. He is not a fan of the “sunshine” view of Los Angeles exceptionalism or of the “Los Angeles noir” trope popularized by Mike Davis. Instead, he argues that “the workaday world in Los Angeles differed very little historically from the workaday world in America’s other industrial cities. Indeed, in some respects it has been worse” (8). He attributes the weaknesses of Los Angeles’s labor movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the same causes articulated in the work of Robert Fogelson, Mark Wild, and many others. These include the late arrival of heavy industry and the fragmented geography of the region. To these he adds two additional variables: what he calls the “ethno-racial peculiarities of its labor force, and the ubiquity of its suburban values” (324). The first speaks to the diversity of the population, and in particular the relative shortage both of poor African American workers (who were so integral to the development of labor movements in other cities) and of working-class European immigrants. The second, “suburban values,” is less well formed. But he suggests that the values held by suburban whites in the years before World War II were often antithetical to collectivism and trade unionism. “The peculiar mixture of possessive individualism, moral evangelism, and fixation on suburban privacy . . . appear to have permeated the entire community, including many of its workers, more completely than they did in most of America’s other great industrial cities (330).” Moving forward in time to the 1930s, among the more interesting topics Laslett tackles is the founding of the Los Angeles CIO by “insurgent” factory workers in South and East Los Angeles (132). Laslett deftly teases out the tangled connections among the struggles of the United Auto Workers and the Steel Workers Organizing Committee; the union activity of the city’s garment, agricultural, and dockworkers; and the rise of the New Deal. He paints a compelling portrait of a key moment when organized labor had at last successfully countered the decades-long dominance of the open shop in the region.

Drawing out these sorts of connections is indeed one of the strengths of the synthesis Laslett has created. Cesar Chavez, for example, appears, as one would expect, in the discussion of the rising power of the farm labor movement in the 1960s. But Laslett also connects him to the Brown Berets of East Los Angeles and to the radical Chicano movement of urban Los Angeles. The author argues that Chavez’s embrace of labor and civil rights instead of radicalism, and his rejection of violence, had a powerful influence “on a new generation of Mexican...